August 24, 2011

The First Step in Living Nobly

Think back, if you will, to a time when we didn't have scientists using a fairly reliable system of knowledge to uncover the secrets of the universe. When we didn't believe in a single God giving order and law and hope to the world. When life was chaos.

It's a world that might have driven a modern person crazy. For every conceivable fear, there was some supernatural answer at hand. Magical practices appeased whimsical forces—sometimes. Worried about the rainfall? About dying in battle? Don't try to make sense out of things. Just give the local shaman your sheep, and hope for the best.

Although it's rarely read this way, this week's Torah reading describes nothing less than a revolution in the way human beings interacted with the unknown.

Usually we think of the Bible's big monotheistic revolution as one of centralization. Although every society had its priests, conjurers, and other intermediaries with the divine, in ancient Israel they were focused: a single God, a single cult, a single altar. We like to think of it as a philosophical unification of truth and morality under a single God.

But centralization had a flipside, as well: the effective elimination of the supernatural as something accessible to ordinary people on a daily basis. No longer were there local priests to handle sacrifices on easy-access altars. No more idols in your backyard. If you wanted to get close to anything otherworldly, you'd have to travel all the way to the Tabernacle.

In the meantime, day-to-day life became shockingly plain. Political leaders were revered for their wisdom in judgment and success in war—not so much for their mastery of the dark forces. The flipside of a centralized worship, in other words, was a radical bracketing out of the supernatural from ordinary life.

This week's reading gives us a list of ways in which Israelites hoped to achieve this.

First, there is the removal of all localized worship, not just of false gods but even of the God of Israel. "Take heed to yourself that you offer not your burnt offerings in every place that you see: but only in the place which the Lord shall choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer your burnt offerings . . . "

This was a lot more radical than we usually think. It's hard to imagine Judaism without the synagogue, but our text gives us no reason to think that any organized worship of God took place outside the Tabernacle. Even individuals in the Bible saw prayer as something unusual and occasion-driven, rather than scheduled thrice daily. When Hannah, the mother of Samuel, wanted to pray for God's relief of her barrenness, she traveled to the Tabernacle to beseech God. Synagogues and prayer books would come much later.

Instead, for most people, biblical "religion" was expressed in behavior: dietary laws, Sabbath laws, submission to Mosaic civil law, and teaching of God's texts are pretty much all there was. The sense that we could somehow appease the crazy cosmos to improve our lives was suddenly gone, in a universe that was now, for the first time, supposed to make sense.

Second, there is the overwhelming dismissal of local prophets claiming to offer easy access to the supernatural. The Israelites are here instructed that "if there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, of which he spoke to you, saying, Let us go after other gods, which you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not hearken to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams . . . " (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). The whole industry of idolatrous magicians and soothsayers would be eliminated. Only prophets of God would be suffered—and even they, as the Bible shows us, often had a hard time of it.

Third, there's an intensive effort to prevent people from reflexively backsliding to the chaotic world of the ever-present supernatural. Don't listen to your friends and relatives who tell you to worship other gods, we are told. Don't follow your curiosity to study the practices of the idolaters. If a whole city turns to idolatry, destroy it. In the Israelite state, all that supernatural stuff was ultra-taboo, for fear of bringing back the chaos that reigned before the revolution.

Still other passages point in the same direction. We are told to remember that the Levites aren't merely conduits for the supernatural, they're also real people who need to eat, and we aren't allowed to neglect them. And we're given practical, non-mystical solutions for people who live too far from the Tabernacle to bring sacrifices and tithes.

What emerges from all this is the incredible, extraordinary establishment of a way of life that most of us, religious and secular alike, would today find quite normal. In a few crucial ways, this new form of life was a precursor to what would eventually become the modern world. For the majority of humanity today, the universe is something inherently stable, governed by human wisdom and laws of nature, in which even the most powerful people can be held accountable for their successes and failures; in which you can't just petition the gods at an altar every time you're worried about your future; in which people have to plan ahead and take responsibility for themselves and others; in which ordinary people have the luxury of focusing far less energy on appeasing forces beyond their comprehension—and far more energy on the art of living nobly.